The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  If we were lucky enough to cross paths with Shakespeare, would we recognize him? Today we are so accustomed to seeing pictures of the playwright that we tend to assume that we have a reliable notion of his appearance, but, as mentioned in the introduction, only two images have a reasonable claim to authenticity. The first is Martin Droeshout’s famous engraving in the First Folio (figure 0.2); the second is the funeral effigy in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. Although both date from several years after Shakespeare’s death, they were at least carried out under the guidance of those who knew him; as such—as bland as they are—they are our best guess at his appearance. (The funeral bust has been famously described as looking like a “self-satisfied pork butcher.”) A runner-up is the “Chandos portrait” that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Dating from about 1610, it has the advantage of being painted while the playwright was still alive; unfortunately, we don’t know for sure that it actually is Shakespeare. Its subject certainly resembles the man in the Droeshout engraving, and the painting is from the right time period; unfortunately, its provenance is a blank prior to 1747—more than 130 years after Shakespeare’s death—when it came into the possession of the Chandos family. The middle-aged man in the portrait, with slightly unkempt facial hair and sporting an earring, has something of the bohemian look that, warranted or not, we seem to expect in an artistic genius.

  * * *

  We can increase our chances of bumping into the playwright if we know where to look. Where, exactly, did Shakespeare live? He seems to have moved several times during his London years; by one account, he lived for a time in Shoreditch, and later in Bishopsgate, where, according to tax records, he was residing by 1596.* Later, toward the end of the decade, he resided in Southwark—a logical move, as by this time it was the heart of London’s theater scene. (Today’s visitors are of course drawn to the reconstructed Globe Theatre; but one must also head for Southwark Cathedral, where one can see a memorial plaque to Shakespeare’s younger brother Edmund, an actor, who was buried in the church in 1607. The dramatist John Fletcher, Shakespeare’s collaborator for his final plays, rests there as well. Stained-glass windows, meanwhile, illustrate scenes from Shakespeare’s plays.)

  The playwright would still have been living north of the Thames when his work first appeared in print. Shakespeare’s epic poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, date from 1593 and 1594 respectively. But we know he had already made a name for himself as an actor and a playwright in London by 1592, because of a reference to him in a pamphlet by a poet and playwright named Robert Greene. In a snarky commentary on London’s theatrical scene, Greene attacks Shakespeare as an “upstart crow, beautified with our feathers” and goes on to parody a scene from Henry VI, Part 3. Greene refers to the play’s creator as someone “in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie”—clearly a put-down (as well as a not very clever pun on Shakespeare’s name). Thanks to Greene, we know not only that Shakespeare was working in London by this time (and had at least one set of history plays under his belt), but that he was successful enough to make his colleagues jealous. (We know from independent sources that Henry VI was performed early in 1592—possibly with Shakespeare himself among the cast.)

  Shakespeare was prolific, and he had to be: The demand for new plays was high, and there was a good living to be made for a playwright capable of filling that need. It’s been estimated that one-third of London’s adult population saw a play at least once a month, with single performances drawing an audience of up to three thousand. As Shapiro notes, Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were writing for “the most experienced playgoers in history.” The playwright’s colleagues were men of remarkable talent in their own right: This was the London of Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, both of whom were renowned for their poignant tragedies. Marlowe’s life was cut short in the spring of 1593 when he was fatally stabbed during a bar-room brawl. We don’t know if Shakespeare mourned for his colleague, but there is no doubt that Marlowe’s death left a vacuum in London’s theatrical world, and that Shakespeare helped to fill that void. He wrote, on average, two new plays every year, and kept up that pace until nearly the end of his career. Shakespeare was also a shrewd businessman. Together with his fellow actors, he became a shareholder in the construction of a grand new open-air theater, the Globe, to be built in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames; Shakespeare technically owned one-eighth of the new building. Theaters, deemed morally dangerous, were forbidden within the city proper; but anyone who could afford a ferry ride, or who didn’t mind a brisk walk across London Bridge, could pay one penny to see a performance of Julius Caesar or Hamlet.

  Shakespeare’s writing career can be divided very roughly into two halves, centered on the year 1600. In the seven or eight years up to this point, he produced a mixture of historical dramas and comedies, including several that are still among his best-loved works, including A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice. From early in this period we find the bloody revenge tale of Titus Andronicus; by its end we have one of Shakespeare’s most refined comedies, As You Like It, and his first great tragedy, Julius Caesar. It was at about this time that the published versions of Shakespeare’s plays began to routinely bear his name; previously, a playwright’s name was hardly worth mentioning, but by this stage Shakespeare was famous enough that his publishers knew it would boost sales.* Indeed, Shakespeare was now earning a decent living from the theater, perhaps making two hundred pounds a year—“at least ten times what a well-paid schoolmaster could hope for,” as Samuel Schoenbaum points out. He was, as Jonathan Bate and Dora Thornton note, “the first Englishman in history to make a serious living by his pen.”

  After 1600, Shakespeare produced a string of powerful tragedies, beginning with Hamlet and continuing with Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. And yet it is not as though he had forgotten how to be funny; Twelfth Night dates from the beginning of this period, and there is plenty of humor both in the tragedies and in the so-called romances, which include The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. All this time, however, Shakespeare was investing in property back in his native Stratford, and, sometime around 1613, he returned to the city of his birth. He died there on his fifty-third birthday, and, as with so many other details of Shakespeare’s life, the cause is unknown; syphilis, typhoid, and influenza have all been suggested.

  WOULD THE REAL WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE PLEASE STEP FORWARD?

  This condensed biography gives us the bare bones of Shakespeare’s life and career. We may feel we have almost gotten to know the man—but certainly not nearly as well as we would like to. How well can we know William Shakespeare? The documentary evidence is scant enough to count on the fingers of two hands—the parish records of the baptism, the marriage, and the birth of his children; a smattering of legal documents and investment records; and the famous will in which he leaves his “second best bed” to his wife. There are a mere fourteen words known to be written in his own hand (comprising six signatures and the additional words “by me” on the famous will).† It’s not much to go on—and it puts biographers in a bit of a pickle, as they strive to reconstruct Shakespeare’s thoughts and actions.* (And, inevitably, it encourages the anti-Stratfordians.) Of course, most books about Shakespeare—your local university library will likely have thousands—aren’t biographies at all; instead, they examine Shakespeare’s writings, a far more fruitful subject. The vast majority of Shakespeare scholarship focuses on what he wrote, not who he was.

  Still, the urge to “meet” Shakespeare is, for many of us, inescapable—just as we might fantasize about getting to know Mozart or Einstein. And so the biographical gaps gnaw away at us. Consider, for example, the famous “lost years”—the period following the birth of Shakespeare’s twins, in Stratford, in 1585, and the first known reference to the playwright as an active Londoner (from Greene’s pamphlet of 1592). Where was he during those seven years, and what was he up to? One of his earliest biographers
asserted that he was “a schoolmaster in the country”; others imagined him working as a law clerk or serving his country as a soldier. (As Jonathan Bate notes, schoolmasters seem to like the schoolmaster theory, while lawyers tend to favor the law-clerk theory.) The various suppositions go in and out of fashion, and none are backed by any hard evidence. More recently, as mentioned, a BBC television documentary argued (as others had previously imagined) that he traveled to Italy during this time. Again, no actual evidence.

  Even for the years in which we do know Shakespeare’s whereabouts, there is much more we would like to know. Take his marriage to Anne, for example. Were they happy? Did he love her, or was he simply doing what needed to be done—“a bow and arrow wedding,” as one of my tour guides put it—when he took her to the altar, seven months after his eighteenth birthday? The short answer is that we don’t know. Here’s one biographer’s attempt at a longer answer:

  In common with most women of her class, [Anne] did not read or write, and may well have been quite willing to play the role of stay-at-home housewife and mother, while her husband acted and wrote in London. She does not seem to have had any great hold over his affections—Shakespeare was not a dissipated man, but nor was he a model of virtue. The most we can say is that he made “an honest woman” of her.

  How much does this paragraph tell us? Very little, in fact. Aside from the brief reference to Anne’s lack of schooling, it adds almost nothing to the smattering of data that we began with. Add a “may well have” and a “seem,” and we have the skeleton of a character sketch of a young man married to an older woman who bore his children. This isn’t meant to be a criticism; when facts are in short supply, we rely on educated guesswork. There is no other way. Indeed, pick up any Shakespeare biography, even one of the very good ones, and you will find a story laced with maybes: “he would have”; “he would likely have”; “one can imagine”; and so on. “It is possible” that Shakespeare’s mother took her young son to Wilmcote to avoid the plague (Donnelly and Woledge); “It is easy to imagine” Shakespeare as a young law clerk (Greenblatt); “It is likely” that Shakespeare’s old schoolmate, Richard Field, helped him find accommodations on his arrival in London (Day); Shakespeare “must have been” a familiar presence in the London bookshops (Shapiro); “we may plausibly imagine” Shakespeare haunting the bookstalls (Ackroyd). Frank Kermode, in his own very good Shakespeare biography, asks readers to indulge him as “these speculations grow more and more far-fetched as one ‘might have’ succeeds another, or a ‘may well have’ or a ‘surely.’” (Kermode uses such constructions judiciously—and unavoidably: “We must assume” that Shakespeare attended the local grammar school; Shakespeare “could well have” attended the so-called mystery plays in Coventry. Indeed, the reader may have noticed them in the present work.)

  NOBLE WEEDS AND OTHER GRAINS

  Our picture of Shakespeare may seem more like a collection of fragments than a unified whole. There is so much more that we would like to know: We don’t know if any of Shakespeare’s children ever visited him in London, or if he ever gave them any fatherly advice; we don’t know if he cried when told of the death of his son, Hamnet, in 1596. We don’t know if he was a good archer, or if he gambled at dice or cards; we don’t know who he went to the taverns with, or what they spoke about after a few pints of ale; we don’t know if he was a regular at the Southwark whorehouses or if he remained faithful to his wife back in Stratford. And speaking of Shakespeare’s sexuality, biographers (and ordinary readers) have often wondered if he was bisexual.* We yearn for any clue, no matter how minuscule. When one is offered, we bite: When archaeologists discovered traces of cannabis in the garden of one of Shakespeare’s properties in Stratford, about a decade ago, it was big news. “Did cannabis fuel Bard’s genius?” asked a headline on the BBC News website. The analysis was carried out on some two dozen clay pipes found on the site. The lead archaeologist also cited the reference to a “noted weed” in Sonnet 76. Could this be an allusion to the poet’s predilection for marijuana? It’s a stretch, to say the least. (As is so often the case, the theory was in the news for about a day, and then promptly forgotten.) But it does show how desperate we are for any glimpse, no matter how speculative, into the playwright’s life.

  More recently, in March 2013, a team of researchers uncovered documents that suggest that Shakespeare, during a time of famine, hoarded grain for profit and chased down those who could not (or would not) repay their debts. Again, it made headlines: “Bad Bard: a tax dodger and famine profiteer,” trumpeted the Sunday Times; “Shakespeare the ‘hard-headed businessman’ uncovered,” declared the Independent (although, as we’ve seen, we already knew he was a savvy businessman). As usual, the urge to reinterpret the plays in light of the new “evidence” was irresistible: The lead researcher, Jayne Archer of Aberystwyth University, suggested the newly revealed facts are reflected in Coriolanus, set in ancient Rome during a time of famine, and were perhaps inspired by the real-life uprising by peasants in the English Midlands in Shakespeare’s time. What does it mean if Shakespeare was against grain hoarding in the play, but all for it in real life? Perhaps, Archer speculates, Coriolanus was the playwright’s attempt “to expunge a guilty conscience.” She also sees famine as central to the story of King Lear, in which the king’s unfair distribution of resources to his daughters triggers a war.

  We can’t blame scholars for building theories around their data, scant as it may be. But that doesn’t mean that “anything goes.” And that applies whether you’re building your theory from the ground up, from bits of “evidence” (like the grains of cannabis), or starting from the standard narrative and chipping away at it, as the anti-Stratfordians are wont to do. And of course, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Consider Shakespeare’s lack of a personal library: As a skeptical New York Times article recently noted, no books are mentioned in the playwright’s will, and there is no record of him paying tax on such a collection. What can we make of this? Very little, actually—and Bill Bryson has a humorous rebuttal to those who try. He reminds us that we know nothing of Shakespeare’s incidental possessions one way or another. The author of the Times article, Bryson says, “might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probable that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books.”*

  We should also note that while Shakespeare is somewhat of an enigma, he is no more of an enigma than others from his social rank living in England at that time. Indeed, the problem with the surviving traces of Shakespeare’s life, as Stephen Greenblatt has put it, “is not that they are few but that they are dull.” Indeed, compared with Marlowe, a spy who faced accusations of brawling, sodomy, and atheism, Shakespeare seems to have been something of a couch potato. When I spoke with Greenblatt recently, he pointed out that Shakespeare is actually better documented than many of his contemporaries—at least, better than most of his artistic or literary contemporaries. “And certainly [he’s] better known than contemporaries of his social class—unless they got in horrendous trouble with the police,” Greenblatt said, referring to the body of evidence concerning Christopher Marlowe’s activities. “Marlowe had a spy assigned to him, and the spy wrote reports. We could wish that Shakespeare had a spy assigned to him and left reports, but as far as we know that didn’t happen.”

  “WORDS, WORDS, MERE WORDS”

  There is another trap to avoid: We have Shakespeare’s plays, poems, and sonnets—but we must resist the urge to read them autobiographically. Usually, that is easy enough: When Shakespeare writes about the assassination of Julius Caesar, we don’t imagine either that he himself had plotted assassinations, or that he time-traveled to ancient Rome to witness the big moment. (He didn’t have to: He could just read Plutarch’s account, readily available in a recent English translation by Thomas North.) Few would suggest that Hamlet’s indecision means that S
hakespeare was indecisive, or that Iago’s scheming implies that the play’s author was a devious manipulator. But certain scenes—parts of As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale, for example—do conjure up something of life in a small English town, while the epilogue from The Tempest strikes many readers as offering at least a glimpse of the real Shakespeare. Another oft-mentioned example is the scene in King John in which Shakespeare writes poignantly of a mother’s grief at the loss of her son, a play written very close to the time that Shakespeare lost his own son, Hamnet. The temptation to see the author through his works is even greater in the Sonnets, in which the words even play on the author’s name (for example, Sonnet 135, which includes the line, “Whoever hath thy wish, thou hast my Will”). Are we really seeing the inner life of the author behind these lines? Caution would seem to be in order. As James Shapiro puts it, “Since I don’t know when or where Shakespeare is speaking as himself, I steer clear of reading [the sonnets] as autobiographical. I’m not denying that there are elements of Shakespeare’s personal experience woven into the fabric of these remarkable poems. But I am insisting that it is impossible to know how or when such personal elements appear.… It seems rather circular to me to construct the life out of the works and then read the works as autobiographical.”

  That is good advice—but even so, the Shakespeare enthusiast can be forgiven for looking for glimpses of the author behind the words. It is a natural urge, especially when those words are so powerful that they seem to speak directly to us, even four hundred years later. As Greenblatt told me: